Biostar TA790GX A2+

The back panel of the board has a decent amount of inputs with four USB, one Ethernet, DVI/HDMI (only one of these can be used at a time), VGA, audio and PS/2 ports. No clear CMOS button is present, but you can’t really expect one for this kind of price.

You could almost mistake this board for a GIGABYTE, with the light blue dye and colourful plastic everywhere. In fact the only area that it seems to differ is one that is quite important, which is the use (or lack thereof) of solid capacitors. Standard electrolytic caps can be seen everywhere from the power regulation for the expansion slots to the memory. While not necessarily a bad thing, they mean that the power consumption is higher, and they make more heat (which means reduced life).

Overclocking options are well fleshed out, with plenty of control over voltages and features. Most features can be altered and there are no vague options that leave you scratching your head, wondering what they actually do. We managed to squeeze 245MHz out of the board, which is a good result when considering the price.

Another great feature about this board is that the chipset includes a HD3300 graphics core within, allowing multi-monitor support and even some capacity for gaming with just the motherboard. It also includes HD video playback decoding, taking some load off the CPU – making this board perfect for home theatre use. Even if you wanted to run hardcore graphics cards in the board and use three or four monitors, you can do this very easily using Hybrid CrossfireX, making this motherboard and chipset one of the cheapest and most flexible on the market.

With a very tempting price, a multitude of features and the ability to perform in many different roles, this is a motherboard that should definitely get some attention – and it won’t break the bank either.